Engineer In Wonderland

Thanks to the glorious BBC World Service in the middle of last night, I learned that the first multi-MW wind turbine was (and is) Tvindkraf, designed, built and financed in the 1970s, not by a company, but by a bunch of teachers from a school in Denmark. The concrete tower is 53m tall and the glass fibre rotor is 54m ...

Low-cost electronic pcb-based modules bought on-line have revolutionised what can be made quickly, even at home. This I whole-heartedly believe, but even one of my strong faith was not ready for finding out about the EGS002 – a complete control sub-system for sinewave power inverters. Warning to the initiated: voltages in and around power inverters are mains-like, and can kill. ...

‘The Book: A cover-to-cover ex­plor­a­tion of the most power­ful ob­ject of our time’ is a charming and fascinating Radio 4 series that played over the weekend in omnibus form. I loved every minute of it, although was jarred by its final line, which described books as ‘unrepentingly analogue’. But surely, they are digital, as there are 26ish letters plus punctuation ...

I managed to fix a defective bench power supply this weekend. With some judgement, but mostly luck. Manually rotating the front panel current limit pot was kicking one of the loops into oscillation – with just over 100kHz all over the place. I could see it, for example, on the reference voltage for the current limit op-amp. It looked like ...

Cambridge GaN Devices (CGN) has published a video explaining what is different about its novel 650V GaN transistors, which are actually GaN ICs that include circuits as well as the main power switch. The devices do not include a gate driver, but they do include a gate drive modifier circuit which allows any gate driver intended to drive a silicon ...

I just bought a sold-as-seen bench power supply, which has got a bit of a fault, which is turning into a saga. – a particularly unwanted saga, as the PSU was bought to help fix something else. Adjusting the current limit sometimes causes the PSU to oscillate (~105kHz). Attaching the (isolated) scope to the back of the current limit setting ...

A company called Heata is offering to heat your hot water cylinder by attaching a server to it, which will process computation loads from who-knows-where, arriving by a dedicated fibre or 4G/5G wireless. The deal for the hot water tank owner, is that they get free hot water – up to 4.8kWh/day, said the company, adding that it is contractually ...

Already aware of NGK’s interesting EnerCera solid-state lithium-ion cells, I recently came across TDK’s CeraCharge surface-mount solid state rechargeable battery, which appeared in 2020. Intended for load-levelling in energy harvesting applications and backing up real-time clocks, there is one TDK CeraCharge part, the 1812 packaged (4.4 x 3 x 1.1mm) BCT1812M101AG, which operates across 0 to 1.6V (1.5V nominal) and ...

STMicroelectronics has a nice backgrounder on how to drive enhancement-mode GaN power hemts. It starts with a section on the various types of e-mode GaN power hemt and then shifts to describing the necessities and pit-falls of gate driving in gradually increasing, but always readable, detail. ‘E-mode GaN technology: tips for best driving‘ is ST’s AN5583 application note.  

Having spent considerable time with my nose in the Raspberry Pi RP2040 MCU data sheet recently, I feel the need to say how beautifully it is written – not only technically, but also as a work of art. The English is almost lyrical, with hardly a spare word anywhere, while still covering all the necessary registers and clocks and whatever. ...